The Crazy Things Girls Do for Love

Chapter Forty Spring brings more than bugs, buds and birds

Joy Marie is off sick today, so Clemens and Waneeda are on their own for the walk to school.

Waneeda smiles into the shower of blossoms falling down on them like confetti as they near the school. “You know, I really love this time of year,” she says. “Everything looks so pretty.”

Everything looks so pretty, indeed. Spring has officially arrived, humming and buzzing, and dressed in blue skies and sunshine and swathes of green and bursts of blossoms. Even here, deep in the suburbs, where the roads are all paved and the houses trail one another up and down and back and forth like an army of ants, you can smell the new growth and feel the world busy as it emerges from its winter’s rest.

Waneeda holds out a hand to catch some blossoms. “It’s almost like the planet’s getting all dressed up for Earth Day, isn’t it?”

Not that long ago, Clemens’ response to that question would have been that every day is Earth Day, but now what he says is, “I guess that I have to admit I was wrong.” Not about the destruction of the planet, of course, but about things like the Earth Day celebration. They turn up the school drive. “I wasn’t a hundred per cent on board with Cody’s ideas to start with, but now I’m kind of changing my mind. Maybe they’re not as frivolous and shallow as I thought.” Given all the enthusiasm and general hullabaloo, it has to be said that Cody’s laid-back, just-turn-off-that-light method has more merit than Clemens imagined. “Not all of them, at least.” And what, in the end, is wrong with making saving the world seem like fun? “Even all my parents’ friends are coming to the fair and the closest any of them get to anything Green is playing golf.”

“I guess Joy Marie was right,” says Waneeda. “You catch more flies with organic, fairtrade honey than you do without.”

“So maybe people really are starting to be aware, which is better than if they weren’t.” Clemens’ smile shrugs. “Well, you know … a lot more aware than they were last year.”

And last year – long before she freed her hair and exchanged her tracksuit bottoms for gypsy skirts and started planting potatoes – Waneeda would have said, Well, that wouldn’t be hard. But now what she says is, “Like me.”

“Not like—” Clemens’ sentence breaks off like a twig in a heavy wind and he stops short, squinting ahead of him in a who-stuck-the-Statue-of-Liberty-in-the-middle-of-the-track? kind of way. Only it isn’t, of course, the Statue of Liberty that he sees.

“What are those men and trucks doing over there?” asks Waneeda. “Are those chainsaws? Is that a crane?”

“They can’t be,” says Clemens. “We got a stay of execution. They can’t do anything until after the vote and that’s like a month away.”

Needless to say, he doesn’t go on to say what else the things they see might be if they aren’t men, trucks, chainsaws and a crane. Instead, he starts moving again, slowly, as though it’s been a few weeks since he used his legs, but now he is walking not towards the school but the huddle of trees near the tennis court.

“We got all those signatures…” Clemens mumbles. “We won the appeal…”

It is Waneeda who starts to run.